‘I’ll do whatever you tell me. You’re the boss on this one.’
‘Maybe there is no problem. But, whatever happens, Kari and the baby are coming with us when we drive back. Kari’s always been OK with me.’
‘So you owe her, is that it?’
I shrug. ‘She’s my sister,’ I say. ‘Call it what you like.’ Arvid is about to answer, and then he doesn’t and looks away and says to the window:
‘Sorry. Stupid thing to say.’
Yes, it was, but I can’t think about that now. Behind my eyes there are images flashing, making it hard to see straight. My hands tingle, and heat wells up inside me, and inside the car the windows are freezing up, until finally I can’t see a thing. Arvid takes an ice-scraper from the glove compartment, but the humid air freezes and clogs the windows faster than he can remove it, and I have to pull over, roll the windows down and then we both scrape the windscreen. I look at my watch again, this is taking too long.
‘Jesus, haven’t you finished yet?’
‘Take it easy,’ Arvid says. ‘We’ll have to drive for a while with the windows down, I guess. The fan’s not the greatest in the world.’ He scrapes the windows clean on the inside, and I do the outside. I kick at the snow and check my watch and say:
‘OK, let’s get the hell out of here.’
I drive through Gjerdrum to Ask with the windows open, it’s cold as hell, and from Ask I cut across to Kløfta, towards Ånerud. That’s where his place is. I have been there only once, for the christening, but I remember exactly where it is, I remember JD on the steps with the baby in his arms, the proud father, and Kari, pale and worn in the background.
I turn just before the Shell station and look at Arvid. He is quiet and serious.
‘Do you remember the last time we were here?’ I say. ‘At least this time we’ve got enough petrol.’ The petrol gauge is at three-quarters full. He smiles, but says nothing.
‘Do you regret coming with me?’
‘Hell no, it’s not that. Of course I want to come with you.’ That’s about all he has to say, and I do not ask, I have to keep my mind on the driving. The road goes up hill and down dale out here, and there are sudden bends, and even though the road has been cleared, it’s still slippery and churned up. We round a bend, and I concentrate so hard on what’s straight ahead of me that I miss the driveway. I don’t have time to slow down, so I brake instead, and skid sideways past the gate and come to a stop crosswise on the road some twenty metres further down. There is no one else around, only the engine is humming, and Arvid looks at me.
‘No problem,’ I say, wrenching the wheel hard. There is just enough space to coax the car straight, and it’s back and forth a hundred times, but I make it in the end, and then I slowly drive up to the gate and switch the engine off. We sit looking at the house. It’s quite a large house for two adults and a baby. Once upon a time the house was dark, built with tarred boards perhaps, and then later he might have made a half-hearted attempt to paint it white, and given up after one coat, and the brownish tar is showing, and now the paint is flaking off and the house looks weary. On the drive there are two snow-covered vehicles: the lorry I have seen before and a Ford Mustang, and there are no footprints or wheel tracks in the snow. To the right, at the back, is a woodshed. As far as I can make out, there are no tracks leading up to it. Inside the house, the curtains are drawn. No smoke from the chimney. It all looks cold and abandoned.
‘Hell, there’s no one here,’ Arvid says.
‘We’ll see about that.’ I get out of the car and slam the door so hard you can hear it from miles away, and I wade in through the gate and halfway to the house. The snow is up to my ankles. I stop and stare at the curtains in the window on the first floor.
‘KARI!’ I shout. My voice cracks in the freezing air and falls in splinters over the drive, there is a tinkling sound, like glass. I just know someone is standing behind the green flowery curtains.
‘KARI!’ I shout again. My back starts to itch, and I have this fleeting feeling that I have stood like this before, a long time ago, and then I remember when and decide I will not run off a second time and leave Kari behind. But from the house there is not a sound. I walk slowly towards it. A saw and a crowbar stand up against the porch. I pick up the crowbar and feel the frost tear at my palm.
‘Audun!’ I turn. Arvid has opened the car door. He’s getting out, he looks at me and points to the crowbar and shakes his head. ‘Drop that damned thing!’ he shouts, but I hold the metal tight in my hands, and then the child is screaming inside the house. There is a pain in my chest, and I hunch around that pain. I smash the crowbar against the porch, sending a sharp, crisp report into every room, a dry twig snapping in the cold, a gunshot. There is something about that sound. I raise the crowbar, I am about to strike again, I am ready now, I will smoke him out if I have to, and the door swings open, and Kari comes out in her red coat with a large sheepskin bag in her arms. The baby is all wrapped up, I can’t see its face, but I can hear the little whimpers from deep inside, and then Kari stops, rocking the bag gently and says:
‘There, there, little one, everything’s fine,’ and I stand with my arm still in the air, I don’t know what to do with it. I squint so hard my eyes start to ache, and I stare into the dark behind her.
‘Where’s James Dean?’ I say. The words feel sluggish and stiff in the cold.
‘James Dean?’ Kari is puzzled, she looks up at the crowbar and then at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Audun, that’s so like you. You mean Alf. He’s gone to Eidsvoll. He’s been there for two days. He had some cars to buy.’
‘But why did you ring, then?’ I lower the crowbar like some alien thing I try to make invisible, but I have cramp in my forearm, and my hand feels numb and maybe it’s frozen fast to the metal. Kari follows my every move, and she’s no longer smiling.
‘I told you, didn’t I. I want to come home. What exactly were you going to do with that crowbar, Audun? Demolish the house? The door was open, I heard the car come and saw you from the upstairs window,’ she says, pointing, ‘and I just had to dress little one. She didn’t want to be dressed, of course, so she cried like a stuck pig, but that’s how it is. She hates that bag. Here,’ she says, handing me the whole bundle. I have to drop the crowbar, it makes a clanking sound on the doorstep, and I take the bulging bag and hold it with numbed fingers. The baby starts to cry at once, and I stand there breathing smoke signals.
‘Rock her then, Audun,’ Kari says. And I rock away and hear Arvid coming up behind me.
‘Hi, Arvid,’ Kari says, ‘I just have to fetch a few things. I didn’t know you two would be here so quickly. When I had changed this little cry-baby, I rang you back, Audun, but you must have left already.’ She turns and goes into the house. The door makes a creaking sound, and just before it bangs shut, a cat comes shooting out. Arvid rounds me like a buoy and throws himself at the cat, and he catches it and rolls around in the snow, wrestling as if the animal were ten times bigger, howling like Johnny Weismuller in the movies. After a short struggle he gets up, holding the cat firmly by the scruff of its neck. He is all white with snow and has a scratch on his cheek, the cat’s wriggling and hissing, and Arvid raises a clenched fist and grins.
‘I’ve got a brilliant idea,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we kidnap the cat! Then at least we’ll have accomplished something. What do you think?’
I hear what he’s saying, he is trying to be funny, but I don’t really get it. I go on rocking the baby and I say, ‘It’s fine by me.’
He lets go of the cat, it’s running before it hits the ground and rounds the house and is gone behind the woodshed. Arvid brushes snow off his clothes, sighs and looks up at me.
‘Do you know something, Audun. Nothing’s fine by you. Absolutely nothing. And you can stop rocking that baby, she’s not crying any more.’
It’s true. All around us, it is quiet; in the woolly bag, it’s quiet. I look between the blankets and see the baby sleeping, her little fa
ce so smooth.
‘I guess she’s sleeping,’ I say. Arvid nods, rubs his bare hands, takes the mittens from his pocket and puts them on.
‘Shall I hold her for a bit? You could do with a breather.’
‘No, no, I’m fine.’ He nods again, wipes his nose with the mitten and takes a deep breath you could hear for miles and looks up into the air.
‘Jesus, I feel like singing,’ he says, ‘I really do. But maybe I’d better not. She might wake up again.’
‘Best if you don’t,’ I say. The door creaks, and Kari comes out carrying two large bags. She puts them on the step and locks the door with a huge key, and I hand her the baby, and Arvid goes over and takes one bag, and I take the other, and we wade across the drive to the car.
‘That’s all I could carry,’ Kari says. ‘It’s mostly for little one. Alf will bring down more whenever he comes home. He knows I’m going. I said I had to get away for a bit, and then he started to cry. You want to get divorced, he said. Christ, we aren’t even married.’
We push the bags down on the tarpaulin in the boot, and Kari puts the bag with the baby beside her on the back seat. Arvid and I sit at the front. I turn the key and start the car. Kari looks out of the window at the house.
‘The old house. Shit, I think it’s haunted, for a fact. Ride on, my gallant knight, and don’t spare the horses. I want to go home!’ Arvid laughs, and Kari laughs, and I coax the car gently up the slope, and then we glide along between the white fields towards Ask. The sun is out and shines as best it can, and the lines turn soft and yellow, and red in some places, and blue where the fields cut down to the river, and I think of what’s there beneath, the frozen, the rigid, and we don’t speak, and the baby is sleeping in the bag, and by the time we reach the Skedsmo junction, my hands are trembling so badly I pull into the verge, stop and say:
‘How about taking over, Arvid?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’ He opens his door, and I open mine, and we walk around the car. In front, by the grille, his shoulder gently brushes mine as he passes, and then we get in. I lean back in the seat, Arvid turns the car back on the road. I close my eyes. I could sleep now, I think, and then I fall asleep.
I don’t wake up until we pull off Trondhjemsveien. In the bend, the low sun is straight in my face. It’s not even noon yet, and I miss my old sunglasses, but I haven’t worn them outdoors since I started training. Arvid drives under the Metro bridge, into Beverveien, right by the big garage and down the hill. In front of the block, he parks the car with its nose well on to the footpath. Sore and stiff we get out of the car, Kari with the baby in her arms, and Arvid opens the boot, and I pick up one bag and lead the way. There is a Sunday silence in the stairway tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery, and when I enter our flat, my mother is sitting by the kitchen table, smoking, her forehead against the window.
‘Hey, where were you?’ I say. She looks at me, but her mind is miles away. She was never like this before. There is a silence, she is looking right through me. She takes a puff of her cigarette, slowly blows the smoke out and seems to vanish in it.
‘I’m getting married again, Audun,’ she says.
I put down the bag and wipe my hands on my trousers. The lid on the stove is up and the cylinder hotplate is reeking heat into the room.
‘Who to? The man with the white back?’
‘The man with the white back?’
‘Forget it. Do I know who he is?’
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she says calmly, ‘I haven’t known him that long.’
‘Aha. Are you going to move house then, or were you thinking that he should live with us?’
‘That was the idea, yes,’ she says, and now her mind is sharp. She sends me a defiant look.
‘I see. Well, then it’s going to be goddamn cramped here,’ I say, and Kari comes in through the door, the baby is awake, and she calls through the hall:
‘Hi, Mamma! Guess who’s here!’
18
MY FATHER IS dead. Two dog sledders found him on their way home from Lilloseter. It was the 22nd of December. They had taken a trail off the floodlit ski track and had seen a cabin in a clump of trees with a metre of snow on its roof. The cabin wasn’t there before, they said, so they steered the dogs off the trail to take a closer look. They were young men of my age with red anoraks and that Helge Ingstad look in their eyes and blue and white Oslo Dog Sledders Club badges on their arms. The cabin was small and solid and as tight as a bottle. The person who had built it knew what he was doing. Inside the cabin my father lay in his sleeping bag on a mattress of spruce with a primus stove up by his shoulders. There was no paraffin left. He must have fallen asleep, and it had burned with a flame turning brighter and brighter and finally poisoned him. He didn’t feel a thing. At least that’s what the doctor at Aker Hospital said. He had been dead for three days, he said, but it was cold, and I could picture the grey-blue air and the snow with its hard crust and the dog sledders doing what they had to do with a lump in their throats, loading my father on to the sled as stiff as a board, and fast as a train they set off for Ammerud where they could ring for an ambulance. From some papers he kept in the grey rucksack, they found their way to us, and now I am glad they did.
The telephone call came at ten o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. My mother was at the kitchen worktop rubbing salt and pepper into the pork to have it ready for the afternoon. Kari was out walking with little one. Alf had been down a couple of times, but Kari did not want to go back up, not yet anyway, and my mother didn’t seem too unhappy about that. She liked being a young, active grandmother. Now we were just waiting for the next one to move in.
And then the phone rang in the hall. I pretended not to hear it, so she had to leave the kitchen, and she lifted the phone with two fingers and placed it between her chin and shoulder, flapping her hands covered with fat and spices. I could smell it from where I was sitting on the steps reading Sailor on Horseback. That’s Irving Stone’s biography of Jack London. Jack had just sold his first story to Overland Monthly. It was the hard work that won him the victory, and in that way a triumph, because it was something he could do. Work hard. His friends bought up the whole print run, but he received no more than five dollars for the story, and even I thought that was lousy pay, and then my mother went all quiet and just stood there with her hands still in the air and her mouth frozen into a half-smile, and I sat watching her instead of reading the book. I guess I knew what she was going to say before she said it. That’s how it is sometimes. She put the receiver down with the same two fingers, very carefully, her eyes shiny and blank and bewildered.
‘It’s your father, Audun,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. I can’t fathom it. They said he was found dead in a cabin up in the woods here. I don’t understand a thing, really I don’t.’
I sat perfectly still, waiting. I never told her I’d seen him, only about the accordion and where it came from, and Kari had also kept quiet. I hadn’t planned to tell her at all, but I felt sorry for my mother just then. She ran her sticky fingers through her hair, and then there were streaks of pepper and brown fat in her blonde locks.
‘You’re getting pork fat in your hair,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening, she stroked her hand across her face, and it left dark stripes on her cheek. It looked like warpaint.
‘I have to go to Aker Hospital to identify him. I could wait until after Christmas, but I’d rather do it now and get it over with. The funeral and all that will have to be sorted out. I don’t know how. You’ll come with me, Audun.’
‘No way,’ I said. She looked at me then, in her new way. I didn’t like it. I stood up, and Jack London fell and slid down the stairs, the stout photograph in black and white on the jacket knocking against the rails. The book belonged to Arvid’s father, they never ran out of stuff at their place, and I bent down to save the cover, and as I stood up, I could see how angry she was.
‘Oh yes you will!’ she said. ‘It’
s your father, for God’s sake!’
‘Hell, I don’t have a father,’ I mumbled, and I meant it, but then she was towering over me, unbending and hard, and she forced me up the stairs, step by step, grabbing my hair.
‘Now we’ve both got pork in our hair,’ I said, but she was deaf in that ear.
‘I am not doing this on my own, Audun. You’re eighteen years old and a grown-up now, and you’ve seen worse. If I can do this, so can you.’
And of course she was right.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll come with you. I can ring Arvid’s father and ask if I can borrow his car. That’d be quicker.’
‘That would be great,’ she said and let go of my hair.
I rang and told him what had happened, and he listened quietly until I had finished the story. I was starting to like the man, and then he said:
‘That’s fine, Audun. You just come and get it. I’ll leave the key in the car, so all you have to do is drive off. But forgive my asking, what’s up with you lot?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with us. Things just are what they are.’
‘Well, fine then, you give my regards to your mother and tell her Happy Christmas and all good wishes.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
It’s not far to Aker Hospital. We drove ten minutes down a very quiet Trondhjemsveien, and of course it was him. I never doubted it. What my mother was thinking, I do not know, but there we were, standing in front of the steel table with his body on it, looking at the white face, and neither of us had really seen it for more than five years. We didn’t cry, and I don’t know why we should have. My mother gave the man in the white coat a nod and said yes, that is Tormod Sletten, and then she leaned over my father and stroked his hair.
‘You were a stylish man. No one can take that away from you,’ she said, and turning to me, she said, ‘You’re starting to look like him, Audun, but of course, you’ve got my hair. There’s no denying that.’ She smiled and stroked my hair, too, and my cheek, and then it got a little awkward. Luckily she started talking to the white coat about the funeral, he could arrange it for the 29th he said, and I made for the wall and leaned against it and looked over at the table in the middle of the tiled floor. He was different now, his hair was grey, almost white, and his face was white, smooth even, and the furrows down his cheeks were not so distinct. Maybe they have done something to him, I thought, and carefully passed my hand over my own face.